A few weeks ago Mediterranean Algae entered Lanzadera, Juan Roig’s startup incubator in Valencia, to accelerate its growth. Previously, this Alicante startup had already rubbed shoulders with the local entrepreneurial ecosystem in innovative gastronomic events such as ftalks, promoting the product they have in their hands, Mediterranean seaweed grown outside the sea for edible or cosmetic use.
“Everything was born with my concern after traveling through Asia. I wanted to change the perception that we had on the Mediterranean coast of the coast and the beach, which seems to be only for tourism or nautical activities. On that trip I saw that there they looked at the sea as a different place and a place to generate resources,” explains Yago Sierras, co-founder and CEO of this company based in Santa Pola.
His turning point was, like for so many others, the pandemic. It was then that that noise from Sierras became a business project whose first milestone was developing its own technology to grow algae far from the open sea. “Cultivating algae outside the sea makes more sense than it seems if we apply it to the industry,” he defends. Because it is this segment that the company now focuses on, which began offering, and still does, its product to restaurant and cosmetic companies, but also to the final buyer, such as serums or sun creams with sun protection.
Of course, the start, he says, was in a fish farm. “First, as we did not have resources, we did it on land in Camp d’Elx, with a couple of livestock troughs that were abandoned, it was a bit like doing a Frankenstein, but with prizes and funding that we received we expanded,” says the young businessman. That was at the beginning of 2021, then they managed to launch their first cosmetics brand and after it was commercialized, they had the necessary push to have their own warehouse.
And although their first steps were taken with natural cosmetics laboratories, large cosmetic brands or food supplement companies, now they have begun to “touch different markets”, since their objective is to be able to grow faster, which is why they have decided to stop the lines of direct sales to the consumer and go directly to the supplier.
Fish farms – “fish waste is the food for algae,” explains Sierras -, water management companies such as desalination plants and the regasification industry who convince to improve their levels of sustainability are the new paths that the company to market its algae as a biofilter. The growth they plan is ambitious, since in 2023 they closed with 100,000 euros of turnover and they hope to round off the next fiscal year of 2025 with 2 million euros of turnover.
The biologist Silvia Antón, the technologist Guillermo del Barco and the aquaculturist Alejandro Simón are the other three people who make up the team of this emerging firm that aims to improve human health and that of the planet through the cultivation of algae. “Our goal is that tomorrow all lines of business can come together and that water can be reused,” concludes the young businessman.
